Black category: 406 books
How to Read African American Literature
Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2016
How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Aida Levy-Hussen’s...
Radical Spiritual Motherhood
Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2011
In this cutting-edge work, Rosetta R. Haynes explores the spiritual autobiographies of five nineteenth-century female African American itinerant preachers to discover the ways in which they drew upon religion and the material conditions of their lives to fashion powerful personas that enabled them...
Dred
A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
Language: English
Release Date: November 17, 2009
Harriet Beecher Stowe's second antislavery novel was written partly in response to the criticisms of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by both white Southerners and black abolitionists. In Dred (1856), Stowe attempts to explore the issue of slavery from an African American perspective.
Through the compelling...
Journeys and Journals
Women's Mystery Writing and Migration in the African Diaspora
Language: English
Release Date: December 22, 2016
Using literary criticism, theory, and sociohistoric data, this book brings into conversation black migrations with mystery novels by African American women, novels which explore fully the psychic, economic, and spiritual impact of mass migratory movements. Diaspora travel has been forced and selected...
The Marengo Jake Stories
The Tales of Jake Mitchell and Robert Wilton Burton
Language: English
Release Date: September 10, 2009
Between 1885 and 1894 The Montgomery Advertiser, The Birmingham-Age Herald, and The New Orleans Times Democrat featured a series of about 80 humorous black-dialect sketches by Robert Wilton Burton, a bookseller and writer from Auburn, Alabama. According to Burton, these tales were based on various...
by Toni Morrison
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2007
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2007
The Nobel Prize-winning author now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.
Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist"...
Blues for Mister Charlie
A Play
Language: English
Release Date: September 17, 2013
In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence--which is loosely based on the notorious 1955 killing of Emmett Till--James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race. For where once a white...
The Life of Langston Hughes
Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America
Language: English
Release Date: January 10, 2002
February 1, 2002 marks the 100th birthday of Langston Hughes. To commemorate the centennial of his birth, Arnold Rampersad has contributed new Afterwords to both volumes of his highly-praised biography of this most extraordinary and prolific American writer. In young adulthood Hughes possessed a nomadic...
The World of Shaft
A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films and Television Series
Language: English
Release Date: October 5, 2015
Mention Shaft and most people think of Gordon Parks’ seminal 1971 film starring Richard Roundtree in a leather coat, walking the streets of Manhattan to Isaac Hayes’ iconic theme music. But the black private dick who inspired the blaxploitation film genre actually made his debut on the printed...
by Lorraine Hansberry
Language: English
Release Date: February 22, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: February 22, 2012
By the time of her death at age thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun she gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of black family life in the inner city. Barely five years later, with The Sign...
Chaotic Justice
Rethinking African American Literary History
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2009
What is African American about African American literature? Why identify it as a distinct tradition? John Ernest contends that too often scholars have relied on naive concepts of race, superficial conceptions of African American history, and the marginalization of important strains of black scholarship....
Writing Blackness
John Edgar Wideman's Art and Experimentation
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2010
One of the most critically acclaimed yet least recognized contemporary writers, African American author John Edgar Wideman creates work often described as difficult, even unfathomable. In Writing Blackness, James Coleman examines Wideman's prolific body of work with the goal of making his often elusive...
Me and My House
James Baldwin's Last Decade in France
Language: English
Release Date: March 29, 2018
The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My House Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin’s home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics...
by Alain Locke
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2014
From the man known as the father of the Harlem Renaissance comes a powerful, provocative, and affecting anthology of writers who shaped the Harlem Renaissance movement and who help us to consider the evolution of the African American in society.
With stunning works by seminal black voices such...